Marketing, art and voices of dissent: promotional methods of protest art by the 2014 Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

Limited research exists around the interrelationships between protest camps and marketing practices. In this paper, we focus on the 2014 Hong Kong protest camps as a context where artistic work was innovatively developed and imaginatively promoted to draw global attention. Collecting and analyzing empirical data from the Umbrella Movement, our findings explore the interrelationships between arts marketing technologies and the creativity and artistic expression of the protest camps so as to inform, update and rethink arts marketing theory itself. We discuss how protesters used public space to employ inventive methods of audience engagement, participation and co-creation of artwork, together with media art projects which aimed not only to promote their collective aims but also to educate and inform citizens. While some studies have already examined the function of arts marketing beyond traditional and established artistic institutions, our findings offer novel insights into the promotional techniques of protest art within the occupied space of a social movement. Finally, we suggest avenues for future research around the artwork of social movements that could highlight creative and political aspects of (arts) marketing theory

Social movements, the European crisis, and EU political opportunities

Social movements in the wake of the financial crisis have shifted from the counter-summits and world social forums of the global justice movement to the camps of the anti-austerity mobilizations, and from a clear focus on building ‘another Europe’ to more domestically embedded issues. Among other reasons, this turn away from the EU can be linked to contracting political opportunities for social justice movements at the European level. This article addresses the closure of opportunities at the EU level for the work of social movement groups campaigning on specific EU policies. We reflect on the complexity of the EU’s political opportunity structure prior to the financial crisis, before examining changes to the EU’s architecture effected through responses to the crises and outlining arguments on how EU level opportunities around socio-economic issues in particular have shrunk as a result. We then show how the perception of other political opportunities at the EU level is affected by the austerity response by drawing on campaigns that sought to exploit new opportunities included in the Lisbon Treaty and designed to increase citizens’ input. Opportunities introduced by changes made in the Lisbon Treaty are perceived through the prism of contracted opportunities flowing from power shifts caused by the response to the financial crisis

Contesting European Regions

The research on which this paper is based was conducted under an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Professorial Fellowship [grant number RES-051-27-0302].Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Institutionalisation of Social Movements: Co-option And Democratic Policy-making

Over the past 30 years, urban policy in Brazil has undergone a major transformation, both in terms of regulatory frameworks and the involvement of citizens in the process of policy-making. As an intense process of institutional innovation and mobilisation for decent publicservices took place, academics started to consider the impact of institutionalisation on the autonomy of social movements. Using empirical evidence from a city in the northeast of Brazil, this article addresses the wider literature on citizen participation and social movements to examine specifically the problem with co-optation. I examine the risks linked to co-optation, risks that can undermine the credibility of social movements as agents of change, and explore the tensions that go beyond the ‘co-optation versus autonomy’ divide, an issue frequently found in the practices of social movements, in their dealings with those in power. In particular, this article explores the learning processes and contentious relationships between mainly institutionally oriented urban movements and local government. This study found that the learning of deliberative skills not only led to changes in the objectives and repertoires of housing movements, but also to the inclusion of new components in their objectives that provide room for creative agency and which, in some cases, might allow them to maintain their autonomy from the state

Hail the Snail: Hegemonic Struggles in the Slow Food Movement

This paper explores how new institutional fields are established and extended. We argue that they are created by social movements engaging in hegemonic struggles and which develop social movement strategies, articulate discourses and construct nodal points. We examine how this process played out during the creation and development of the Slow Food movement. We argue that the positioning of Slow Food as a new field was based particularly on using multiple strategies, increasing the stock of floating signifiers, and abstracting the nodal points used. This mobilized new actors and enabled a more extensive collective identity which allowed the movement to progress, extend, and elevate the field of Slow Food. The field of Slow Food was transformed from appealing only to gastronomes to becoming a broader field that encompassed social justice activists and environmentalists. This study contributes to the existing literature on field formation, the role of social movements in this process, and political dynamics within social movements. We focus on the importance of hegemony in the institutional processes around field formation by drawing out how Slow Food created a field through the forging of hegemonic links among a range of disparate actors

“Either Everyone Was Guilty or Everyone Was Innocent”: The Italian Power Elite, Neopatrimonialism, and the Importance of Social Relations

Rarely does the Byzantine world of football administration get exposed as clearly as during the 2006 calciopoli scandal. This scandal laid bare the interpersonal relationships of football administrators at the top three Italian men’s football clubs: Juventus, Inter, and AC Milan. This article draws on the media leaks that revealed the inner workings of those working within football to argue that the football clubs are pyramids of power for club presidents that allows them to operate within the Italian power elite. This is done through interpersonal clientelistic networks that operate within a neopatrimonial system. Theoretically, this article draws on four main concepts: C. Wright Mills’s concept of the Power Elite, Lomnitz’s model of “Pyramids of Power,” Eisenstadt’s notion of neopatrimonialism, and Mauss’s utilization of the gift. Power is exercised through quid pro quo relationships, with certain key individuals operating as brokers to the flow of favors throughout the network